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Is Homestuck the Ulysses of the Internet?
>> MIKE: Here’s an idea: Homestuck is the internet’s Ulysses. theme If you’ve never heard of Homestuck I’ve potentially just given you something to do with all of your evenings and weekends. For the next two years. Homestuck is a webcomic that’s written and drawn by Andrew Hussie. It’s about a boy named John and his groups of friends who, while playing a game called Sburb, they accidentally, you know, open a rift which summons some meteors and so to escape the meteors they have to enter this other worldly realm called the Medium and there’s this ancient battle that’s going on and they meet this other group- horn Actually, you should just read it, but you should also maybe clear your calendar because Homestuck is long. Very long. Five thousand pages long. Five thousand pages long and it’s not even done yet. And just as a quick aside, I’m not current on Homestuck yet though I’m getting close so no spoilers in the comments. I’m serious. None. I will flag you as spam. A mammoth story told in the style of a text adventure using still images, animated GIFs and chat logs, Homestuck also occasionally requires its readers to watch flash animations, play flash games and read huge walls of text. This makes it a really novel storytelling vehicle. But because of these things it can also be a little bit of a chore to get through. Which isn’t too uncommon, I mean Homestuck isn’t the only difficult piece of literature with a huge cult following, right? I mean, I have friends who have made their own infographics in an attempt to keep track of the over four hundred characters in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and if you went to an art school you probably suffered through all the not tennis parts of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. These tombs, though great, are but delightful heraldry on the path towards the Mecca of labyrinthine lit: James Joyce’s Ulysses. Considered one of, if not the, greatest English language novel ever written, Ulysses is a knot of syntactic rigamarole. It is about one man, Leopold Bloom, on one day, June 16, 1904 and it is two hundred and sixty-five thousand words long with a lexicon of over thirty thousand words. ding And it is a challenge. For example: “A vowel, so nay I could, rebound of garter, not leave thee. Smack! Leclosh Fie smack. A vowel, warm, sweetheart. Goodbye.” In one sense Ulysses is about one dude in his home city of Dublin. There’s a carriage ride, a funeral, a dinner, some random wandering… In another sense it’s also kind of about itself and its circuitous construction, it’s constant allusions to Homer’s The Odyssey and Joyce’s insane linguistic gymnastics. In a way it might be because of its challenging bizarreatude not in spite of it that people who’ve read Ulysses, who are kind of like unicorns, but instead of horns they have degrees in the arts, really, really enjoy it. There’s this weird, rare joy in getting through Ulysses and figuring it out, in wading through the details and all of the nonsense prose, in looking a word up in the dictionary every ten minutes only to find out that its not in there because Joyce invented it. Jerk. At the finish line, however, though parts may have been unpleasant, you really feel as though you’ve accomplished something. This is called effort justification. In essence, the more difficult an experience you inflict upon yourself, the more likely you are to think it was totally worth it once it’s done. It’s a bit of cognitively dissonant psychology which explains why people love organizations which haze them you sir, may I have another?” Or are enamored with their terrible tattoos or go see The Expendables 2. ‘em, find ‘em, kill ‘em.” Explosion. It kind of means if you have a bad time you’re gunna have a great time. Of course there is a law of diminishing returns. If something is a huge challenge but also totally sucks, then all bets are off. And that is a balance that’s really hard to strike. It’s why Joyce can throw thoughts on a page the way Pollack throws paint on a canvas and why Hussie can up and kill every single one of your favorite characters and what do we do? We stick around because the challenge makes the awesome stuff that much awesomer. Of course not everyone agrees. Its difficulty might be why The Modern Library lists Ulysses as the greatest English language novel while The Guardian describes it as a book which is more discussed than read. And its flagrant disregard for its players, um, readers, might be why I’ve heard so many lamentations from friends who just aren’t able to continue Homestuck. But this doesn’t change the fact that Andrew Hussie has undertaken a creation of unrivaled proportions on the internet, the very source of our, quote, shrinking attention spans. He successfully challenged the very common assumption that internet audiences don’t want a challenge and won’t stick around if one arises. And while for some that might be true, there are still plenty more who are willing to put up with all of the time shenanigans that Hussie can summon. And why? Because it’s worth it. What do you guys think? Are you more likely to enjoy a piece of media that presents a larger challenge? Let us know in the comments. And if you’re not too busy futsing with your fetch modus, subscribe. horn We predicted that you guys would have some really smart things to say about William Gibson. And you didn’t disappoint. Let’s see what you had to say. First and foremost to MrMonfresClass, awesome questions. Yes, Ray Bradbury, genius, love him. hoverboards, I’m not so sure, seems like we’re not going to get there by the time that Back to the Future said we would, but we did just get hoverbikes, so, uh, we’ll put a link to that in the description, those seem pretty cool. Time machine, I think probably a little bit further off. And as far as the Doctor selling Sonic Screwdrivers… questionable, but if he did have a corner shop I would definitely go there. And please make sure that you thank you’re awesome teacher Mr. Monfres for letting you watch the show. And keep asking questions, we will keep answering them. There was also an awesome take on some of the ideas in this episode on io9 so we’ll put a link to that discussion in the description as well, you should check it out. Joshua Magee I don’t understand this comment. It, it’s just an arrangement of random words that make no sense. jinsu2301 points out that a lot of Nostradamus's predictions were based on celestial patterns so that in effect they’re not really random. In response to that I think that you should go and check out this thing called Bibliomancy which was one of Nostradamus’s favorite techniques. Opfelic and a bunch of other people pointed out that William Gibson and his cohorts might not be predicting the future but might be inspiring it and that the cause and effect relationship might be totally reversed which is really interesting and totally valid, I would love to hear what those guys have to say about that. William Gibson if you’re watching send us an email. lookattheceiling makes a really interesting point that the availability and ease of use of technology is actually making it easier to predict what happens next. Which totally makes sense. I totally buy that. Me too! She was carving her initials in the side of the moose with an interspace toothbrush given to her by her brother-in-law Sveng. Wait, do you know Sveng? theme Category:Complete Category:English